CCA Maryland notes that the plan to use State Police helicopters to fly NRP missions will actually cost more - as much as $1.8 million annually - because it costs about $1,500 an hour for NRP to fly versus $4,500 to fly the same mission with a larger state police helicopter.
"That is wasteful in tight economic times and leads one to wonder whether natural resources cases might receive less attention than they require," the CCA letter says.
The total annual operating cost of the aviation unit is $650,000. But when you eliminate $200,000 in federal money that goes to the unit and the $317,000 in salary and benefits that still have to be paid to the men who will transferred someplace else, we're really talking about $133,000.
That's, like, a day of poaching striped bass on the Chesapeake Bay. Or the annual take from a couple of slot machines at Arundel Mills. Or the cost of hiring O'Malley's March to play in your family room for a month of Saturdays.
We could go around and around on this - these are, after all, aircraft nicknamed whirlybirds - but if the O'Malley people would just be sensible and find the pocket change to save the aviation unit, we could all go back to worrying about A-Rod and Ray Lewis.
Fishing is a billion-dollar business in Maryland. Deer hunting generates more than $40 million in retail sales. If there's a bright side to this mess, it's that the outdoors community is once again flexing its fiscal and political muscles.
"I know of no other time all of the groups on our letter have joined in to sponsor such a letter," Plummer says. "There is now talk of an annual summit to pool our numbers and get the DNR back on the fiscal radar of state government."
